90 Max Stirner Quotes From The German Philosopher And Author of 'The Ego And Its Own'
Gallery
Johann Kaspar Schmidt aka Max Stirner was a German philosopher and author born in the year 1806.
He was a big proponent of ideas like individualistic anarchism and egoism. We've hand-picked the best Max Stirner quotes from the German philosopher here in this article.
If you'd like to read more quotes related to Max Stirner quotes, then check out these Arthur Schopenhauer quotes and Kant quotes.
Best Max Stirner Quotes
Here are the best Max Stirner quotes on morals and individualism from the German philosopher. This list of Max Stirner quotes shows why he was such a prominent thinker of his time.
1. "'Freedom' awakens your rage against everything that is not you."
- Max Stirner.
2. "The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us."
- Max Stirner.
3. "Now do you suppose unselfishness is unreal and nowhere extant? On the contrary, nothing is more ordinary!"
- Max Stirner.
4. "I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being."
- Max Stirner.
5. "The true human being doesn’t lie in the future, an object of longing, but rather it lies in the present."
- Max Stirner.
6. "Knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person."
- Max Stirner.
7. "From the moment when he catches sight of the light of the world, a man seeks to find out himself and get hold of himself."
- Max Stirner.
8. "If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself."
- Max Stirner.
9. "I am the true human being."
- Max Stirner.
10. "I can have only so much freedom as I procure for myself by my owness."
- Max Stirner.
11. "It is not recognized in the full amplitude of the word that all freedom is essentially self-liberation."
- Max Stirner.
12. "The young are of age when they twitter like the old."
- Max Stirner.
13. "Liberty of the people is not my liberty!"
- Max Stirner.
14. "Free yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part."
- Max Stirner.
15. "Now why, if freedom is striven after for love of the I after all - why not choose the I himself as beginning, middle, and end?"
- Max Stirner.
16. "We don't call it sin today, we call it self-expression."
- Max Stirner.
17. "Their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them."
- Max Stirner
18. "A race of altruists is necessarily a race of slaves. A race of free men is necessarily a race of egoists."
- Max Stirner.
19. "It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish."
- Max Stirner, 'The False Principle of Our Education'.
20. "If it is right for me, it is right. It is possible that it is wrong for others: let them take care of themselves!"
- Max Stirner.
21. "The moral man is necessarily narrow in that he knows no other enemy than the immoral man."
- Max Stirner.
22. "We are, every moment, all that we can be; and we never need be more."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
23. "It is possible I can make very little of myself; but this little is everything."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
24. "Don’t exhaust yourself on the limits of others; it’s enough if you tear down your own."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
25. "What is it, then, that is called a 'fixed idea'? An idea that has subjected the man to itself."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
26. "One goes further with a handful of might than with a bagful of right."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
27. "Might is a fine thing, and useful for many purposes."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
28. "If I cherish you because I hold you dear, because in you my heart finds nourishment, my need satisfaction, then it is not done for the sake of a higher essence whose hallowed body you are."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
29. "Man, you see, is not a person, but an ideal, a spook."
- Max Stirner.
30. "He who is infatuated with Man leaves persons out of account so far as that infatuation extends, and floats in an ideal, sacred interest."
- Max Stirner.
31. "We do not aspire to communal life but to a life apart."
- Max Stirner.
32. "I love men too — not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism."
- Max Stirner.
33. "The people is dead! Good-day, Self!"
- Max Stirner.
34. "We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
35. "For me you are nothing but—my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
36. "Where the world comes in my way, and it comes in my way everywhere, I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
37. "What is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self."
- Max Stirner.
38. "Whoever will be free must make himself free. Freedom is no fairy gift to fall into a man's lap."
- Max Stirner.
Max Stirner Quotes On Nihilism
Here are the best quotes from Max Stirner on nihilism. These Max Stirner quotes will make you think.
39. "Man, your head is haunted."
- Max Stirner.
40. "No thing is sacred of itself, but by declaring it sacred, by my declaration."
- Max Stirner.
41. "What else was Diogenes of Sinope seeking for than the true enjoyment of life, which he discovered in having the least possible wants?"
- Max Stirner.
42. "Our atheists are pious people."
- Max Stirner.
43. "I shall be the enemy of every higher power, while religion teaches us to make it our friend and be humble toward it."
- Max Stirner.
44. "He serves no higher person, and satisfies only himself. His cause is – a purely egoistic cause."
- Max Stirner.
45. "Now it is clear, God cares only for what is his, busies himself only with himself."
- Max Stirner.
46. "You imagine great things, and depict to yourself a whole world of gods that has an existence for you."
- Max Stirner.
47. "'The truth' outlasts the downfall of the world of gods, for it is the immortal soul of this transitory world of gods; it is Deity itself."
- Max Stirner.
48. "Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of."
- Max Stirner.
49. "Nothing is more to me than myself!"
- Max Stirner.
50. "The truth wears longer than all the gods."
- Max Stirner.
51. "If religion has set up the proposition that we are sinners altogether, I set over against it the other: we are perfect altogether!"
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
52. "Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter."
- Max Stirner.
53. "To the believer, truths are a settled thing, a fact; to the freethinker, a thing that is still to be settled."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
54. "The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness."
- Max Stirner.
55. "Whoso is full of sacred (religious, moral, humane) love loves only the spook, the 'true man,' and persecutes with dull mercilessness the individual, the real man."
- Max Stirner.
56. "Crimes spring from fixed ideas."
- Max Stirner.
57. "For only he who is alive is in the right."
- Max Stirner.
58. "When one is anxious only to live, he easily, in this solicitude, forgets the enjoyment of life."
- Max Stirner.
59. "God sinks into dust before man."
- Max Stirner.
60. "All things are Nothing to Me."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
Max Stirner Society Quotes
Here are the best Max Stirner quotes on society from the German philosopher. This list encompasses Max Stirner nationalism quotes and his views on education and country. Take a look at these Max Stirner quotes to see what you think.
61. "Pray do the like with what you call my property!"
- Max Stirner.
62. "Every labor is to have the intent that the man be satisfied."
- Max Stirner.
63. "The individuals have died 'for the great cause of the nation,' and the nation sends some words of thanks after them."
- Max Stirner.
64. "Insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves"
- Max Stirner.
65. "What matters the party to me? I shall find enough anyhow who unite with me without swearing allegiance to my flag."
- Max Stirner.
66. "If a factory-worker must tire himself to death twelve hours and more, he is cut off from becoming man."
- Max Stirner.
67. "Let us look and see, then, how they manage their concerns – they for whose cause we are to labour, devote ourselves, and grow enthusiastic."
- Max Stirner.
68. "No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commonness of thought and will."
- Max Stirner.
69. "What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing."
- Max Stirner.
70. "People is the name of the body, State of the spirit, of that ruling person that has hitherto suppressed me."
- Max Stirner.
71. "Every State is a despotism, be the despot one or many."
- Max Stirner.
72. "It means that one of my oppressors, like state, religion, conscience, is free."
- Max Stirner.
73. "Property exists by grace of the law. It is not a fact, but a legal fiction."
- Max Stirner.
74. "'Moral spontaneity' corresponds entirely with 'religious and orthodox philosophy', 'constitutional monarchy'"
- Max Stirner.
75. "One is not worthy to have what one, through weakness, lets be taken from him; one is not worthy of it because one is not capable of it."
- Max Stirner.
76. "Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property."
- Max Stirner.
77. "The radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality."
- Max Stirner, 'The False Principle of Our Education'.
78. "Only the free and personal man is a good citizen."
- Max Stirner, 'The False Principle of Our Education'.
79. "Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority."
- Max Stirner, 'The False Principle of Our Education'.
80. "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
81. "The State has always one purpose: to limit, control, subordinate the individual."
- Max Stirner.
82. "Liberate yourself as far as you can, and you have done your part; for it is not given to every one to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to every one is that a limit which is a limit for the rest."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
83. "Just observe the nation that is defended by devoted patriots. The patriots fall in bloody battle or in the fight with hunger and want."
- Max Stirner, 'The False Principle of Our Education'.
84. "The men of the future will yet fight their way to many a liberty that we do not even miss."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
85. "Revolution is aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hope on 'institutions'."
- Max Stirner.
86. "Political liberty means that the polis, the State, is free; freedom of religion that religion is free, as freedom of conscience signifies that conscience is free."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
87. "'Political liberty,' what are we to understand by that? Perhaps the individual’s independence of the State and its laws? No; on the contrary, the individual’s subjection in the State and to the State’s laws."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
88. "My power is my property. My power gives me property. My power am I myself, and through it am I my property."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
89. "The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime."
- Max Stirner.
90. "We owe each other nothing, for what I seem to owe you I owe at most to myself."
- Max Stirner, 'The Ego and Its Own'.
Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Max Stirner quotes then why not take a look at Kropotkin quotes, or Ludwig Wittgenstein quotes.
We Want Your Photos!
More for You
See All
Bachelor of Arts specializing in French with Film Studies, Bachelor of Arts (Year Abroad) specializing in Literature, History, Language, Media, and Art
Georgia StoneBachelor of Arts specializing in French with Film Studies, Bachelor of Arts (Year Abroad) specializing in Literature, History, Language, Media, and Art
Georgia is an experienced Content Manager with a degree in French and Film Studies from King's College London and Bachelors degree from Université Paris-Sorbonne. Her passion for exploring the world and experiencing different cultures was sparked during her childhood in Switzerland and her year abroad in Paris. In her spare time, Georgia enjoys using London's excellent travel connections to explore further afield.
Disclaimer
1) Kidadl is independent and to make our service free to you the reader we are supported by advertising. We hope you love our recommendations for products and services! What we suggest is selected independently by the Kidadl team. If you purchase using the Buy Now button we may earn a small commission. This does not influence our choices. Prices are correct and items are available at the time the article was published but we cannot guarantee that on the time of reading. Please note that Kidadl is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon. We also link to other websites, but are not responsible for their content.
2) At Kidadl, we strive to recommend the very best activities and events. We will always aim to give you accurate information at the date of publication - however, information does change, so it’s important you do your own research, double-check and make the decision that is right for your family. We recognise that not all activities and ideas are appropriate for all children and families or in all circumstances. Our recommended activities are based on age but these are a guide. We recommend that these ideas are used as inspiration, that ideas are undertaken with appropriate adult supervision, and that each adult uses their own discretion and knowledge of their children to consider the safety and suitability. Kidadl cannot accept liability for the execution of these ideas, and parental supervision is advised at all times, as safety is paramount. Anyone using the information provided by Kidadl does so at their own risk and we can not accept liability if things go wrong.
3) Because we are an educational resource, we have quotes and facts about a range of historical and modern figures. We do not endorse the actions of or rhetoric of all the people included in these collections, but we think they are important for growing minds to learn about under the guidance of parents or guardians.